The Public Accounts Select Committee members are the Reservoir Dogs of Parliament. It’s not just their capacity to terrorise, but the black humour they use for light relief as they hunt down the multibillion-pound stashes of public money absorbed by government departments.

The families of protesters killed during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing have written an open letter strongly criticising the new leadership of Xi Jinping for failing to introduce political reforms.

Valtr Komarek, who died yesterday at the age of 82, was a left-wing Czech politician and economist who helped overthrow the country's communist regime. He briefly served as deputy premier of the first post-communist government.

China is struggling to get its estimated 100 million religious believers to banish superstitious beliefs about things like sickness and death, the country's top religious affairs official told a state-run newspaper.

The Independent spoke to Joo-il Kim, a North Korean defector who now lives in New Malden, Surrey, about his life and the current political stand-off in Korea. His story of what led to him escaping is one of shocking sadness, but since coming to the UK - where he is working on a newspaper to smuggle into the country - he has been able to lead a much happier life.

Neon Neon, the side project of Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys (pictured) and dance producer Boom Bip, is back, this time with an album about Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Italian publisher of The Leopard and supposed leftwing terrorist. Rhys came across Feltrinelli when he was given a biography of the maverick entrepreneur. In the Fifties, the scion of a wealthy family helped to smuggle Dr Zhivago out of the USSR before publishing Lampedusa's Leopard.